Sachiko Kusukawa

On natural philosophy

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Picturing knowledge in the early Royal Society: the examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt

Much of science today relies on visual information of one kind or other for its experiments, observations, simulations and publications. The historical study of how visual resources (such as drawings, prints or models) became integral to scientific knowledge is a developing field and an area to which the pictorial remains of the early Royal Society have much to contribute. This paper examines the examples of Richard Waller (d. 1714 or 1715; FRS 1681) and Henry Hunt (d. 1713), Operator of the Society, who both created images for the Societys publications and meetings. By focusing on their contribution to knowledge rather than on their accuracy, I discuss how images were used to express the Societys aspirations and values, and were integral to the weekly business of investigating nature in the early Royal Society.

Drawings of fossils by Robert Hooke and Richard Waller

The drawings of fossils by Robert Hooke and Richard Waller that were the basis of the engravings in Hookes Posthumous works (1705) are published here for the first time. The drawings show that both Hooke and Waller were proficient draftsmen with a keen eye for the details of petrified objects. These drawings provided Hooke with a polemic edge in making the case for the organic origins of ‘figured stones’.

The early days of the Foundation for Intellectual History

It might be difficult to imagine, in this day and age of the Internet and social media, how academics came to form communities over 20 years ago without such technologies. It was a time when resear...

Classics from this journal: Martin Rudwick’s ‘The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760–1840’, History of Science, xiv: 3, 1976, pp. 149–95

This is a brief review of the significance of Martin Rudwick’s article, ‘The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760–1840’, published in this journal 40 years ago.

Uses of Philosophy in Reformation Thought: Melanchthon, Schegk, and Crellius

In the face of such memorable attacks on human philosophising as this in Luther’s Disputation against Scholastic Theology, one may be forgiven for assuming that either no philosophy was taught at Protestant universities, or that even if it had been taught, philosophy no longer had anything to do with theology until the late 16th and early 17th century. “The return of metaphysics” around 1600 in Protestant German universities is a well-known, and, indeed, a well-studied, episode in the history of Western philosophy.2 Here I wish to discuss some Protestant views of the relationship between philosophy and theology before the full-scale reintroduction of metaphysics instruction in Northern Europe. In particular, I shall discuss the views of Philip Melanchthon, Jacob Schegk, and Fortunatus Crellius. It is indeed the case that the traditional, medieval assumptions about the relationship between philosophy and theology were seriously questioned and even abandoned by the first generation of Protestant thinkers; but this did not mean that philosophy lost is relevance to theological issues altogether. In the struggle for reconciliation and need for differentiation within the evangelical camp during the second half of the sixteenth century, philosophy became an indispensable tool for shaping confessional identities, and to this end, humanist scholarship as well as categories of medieval scholasticism were drawn upon. The return of metaphysics around 1600, then, is a culmination of developments that had been going on for at least half a century.